Wartime Europe. Live under German Occupation, 1939-1945

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Tatjana Tönsmeyer
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: Funded in 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 436382627

At the height of Nazi domination during World War II around 230 million people in Europe lived under German occupation. The aim of my book project is to investigate their experi-ences of everyday life, from Tromsø to Heraklion, and from Brest to Smolensk. In order to do so, the book discusses questions such as: What did it feel like to live in an occupied country? How did people interact with the occupiers? What sort of measures, from bureaucratic ones to reprisals, did they have to adapt to? What were the effects on gender relations, taking into account the fact that, in many regions of occupied Europe, men were absent for war-related reasons or because they had been drafted into forced labour, and that it was now mainly the women’s task to look after their families, ensure their survival and well-being and care for the children and elderly people? How did they cope with the most basic of daily tasks, given that German occupation was accompanied almost everywhere in Europe by shortages, and how did people try to survive in regions where hunger raged and the German occupiers criminalized survival strategies? And: What were the consequences for all those threatened by unemployment if the occupiers did not regard their jobs as necessary for the war effort and, instead, drafted a growing number of men and women into forced labour and sent them off to the ‘Reich’? With many communities unsettled by flight, deportation and violence, where did people turn in hard times in order to find social proximity, help and solidarity? What bound urban neighbourhoods or rural villages together? And, where did people turn in their search for orientation in the midst of the complexities and chaos of the war? In answering questions like these, the book aims to discuss occupation and, in particular, the fact of being occupied, as crucial European experiences which shaped both wartime and post-war realities, underlining both national specific traits and transnational similarities. Last but not least, in discussing everyday life under German occupation the book helps to contextualize Jewish strategies of survival in times of Nazi persecution policies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants